 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Peter T. Leeson. He's the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Macy University. He's the author of The Invisible Hook, The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Anarchy Unbound, which was the subject of a previous Free Thoughts episode. His new book is WTF, An Economic Tour of the Weird. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Pete. Thanks for having me. So what is so WTF about WTF? Well, I think a lot of things actually. So I guess first and foremost, the substantive subject matter of the book is, I guess, what I kind of call bizarre or unusual kind of shocking social practices that humans have engaged in throughout history, and including today, that kind of evoke what I call WTF moments. That's the sort of typical, I think, reaction upon learning about them. That's the first way in which it's WTF. And then the second way is actually the organization of the book itself or the kind of way that it's set up. I had this idea when I started working on this stuff that it would be fun to, when writing the book, to set it up as a kind of museum of social oddities. So if you've seen, you know, like Ripley's Believe It or Not, or if you've ever gone through maybe a museum of medical oddities, that's sort of the theme that I had in mind. And so each chapter of the book is set up as a stop on a literal tour through this museum, and then the book is narrated by the tour guide, which is me. And the tour is actually, and thus the book is populated by a number of quasi-fictional characters who I interact with throughout the tour. And it's those interactions that kind of propel the narrative and allow the reason behind these practices to unfold. But you're not, as you said, you're not just talking about weird things that people did in history because there's a lot of weird things people did in history. You're trying to explain why weird things may not be so weird. Yeah, yeah. The entire premise of the book, so I'm approaching it from my economic perspective, which is that things that don't seem to make sense on the surface actually do make sense. And economics is what allows us to understand them. And so the idea is to sort of view these practices or view things that would evoke a WTF in you, again, past or present with an economic approach and by doing so to make sense of them. Then what's the first stop on our tour? We're heading into your museum of weird stuff. So the very first stop, like before the actual stop, it's sort of waiting in the lobby idea of the museum is a bit of a discussion about what economics is, the sort of economic approach that the tour is going to apply. Then I should say again, in case it's not obvious, the book is written to be enjoyed by and totally accessible to somebody who has no economic background and probably maybe even isn't interested in economics in the first place. So that's the sort of the very first preliminary piece. Then the first actual stop of the tour examines a couple of different practices, but the foundation of them is medieval judicial ordeals. And the ordeals are, it's pretty much a she's a witch, Monty Python, very small rocks, way or against a duck kind of thing. I mean, it's a lot, it's along those lines, correct? Well, that's one of the most famous examples that actually I point to in the book, the Monty Python example. Historical ordeals didn't involve any comparisons to ducks. And in fact, they were used prior to the witch craze, which came much later. So medieval judicial ordeals were sort of ninth through 13th century things, about 400 years used throughout Europe. And actually the witch craze in Europe didn't happen until the early 16th century. So these these ordeals had a different nature and they weren't used to prosecute claims of witchcraft because that really wasn't popular yet. In fact, this is a bit of an aside, but during this period, the Catholic Church denied that witchcraft was real. So that wasn't really an important crime. Instead, they were used to try ordinary crimes, things that we today would consider crimes like arson or murder or theft. Did they believe that there was a meaningful relation between how one did on the ordeal and one's actual guilt of the underlying crime? Yeah, the whole premise for them was grounded in this, what we would consider a superstition called Judiciary Day, which is Latin for judgment of God. And the idea was basically that if priests performed the appropriate rituals, they could call upon God to reveal the guilt or innocence of an accused criminal whose guilt or innocence was in doubt to the court. And God would show that to to the court by virtue of how the defendant reacted physically in the ordeal test. So does this mean that when a team loses like the Super Bowl, they're all a bunch of criminals? Does this count as evidence of that? Because God did not intervene in their in their victory? Yeah, something that's actually something like that. They were a little bit more ominous than than lose. Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, but then losing losing a game of football. But but, you know, the basic idea is the same. So let's set the stage. It's a dusty, dirty, medieval town. And Trevor has killed someone's cattle or I've been accused of killing someone's cattle. So you're probably guilty. I'm probably just confirming it. So I know whether or not I killed the cattle. It's just sort of there's no good evidence on on display. There's a he says I killed him. I said I didn't kill them. And so then they decide to have an ordeal. Is this the priest says, OK, it's time to reach into this boiling pot of water and grab the stone at the bottom and and then sort of what happens next? Well, what happens next depends upon the whether or not you committed the crime or not is essentially what I argue. So the first thing going back to the setup to recognize is that medieval judicial systems, you know, they weren't insane. They only used this ordeal system when it wasn't when there wasn't ordinary evidence that you had committed the crime or not. So if somebody, you know, if you've been accused of having stolen or killed the cow and somebody says, you know what, he was with me that day and like a whole bunch of people in the town observed it, then they would exonerate you and that would be the end of it. It was only if they considered the accusation plausible in the first case, and they weren't sure, which is again what you would expect a sensible judicial system to do. And so in this case, you know, in the example you gave, they order you to undergo the hot water ordeal. And in that ordeal, if the water burns you, that was considered evidence. God was letting the water burn you to evidence to the court that you had committed the crime. And if you were innocent, God, the idea was that God would perform a miracle that prevented the water from burning you. And as a result, you would be unscathed, which would evidence to the court that you had not committed the crime. In consequence, you would be exonerated. And the going back to the logic underlying this thing, the idea is that if you imagine that you believed in the superstition that I just described, Judiciary Day, then your incentive to either undergo the ordeal or to decline it, which is in fact another option, you could decline it, for example, simply by the most obvious way would be just confess to the crime. If you confess to the crime, you're probably going to have a slightly reduced punishment compared to what you would have if you underwent the ordeal and failed it. The idea is that your incentive is different depending upon whether or not you choose to under the weather, influences whether or not you will undergo the ordeal or not. And in consequence, your choice about whether to undergo or not will reveal to the court, essentially, whether or not you're guilty or not. It accesses that private information that Trevor would have about his guilt or innocence to the legal system. Did they ever wonder, so this example of plunging your hand into boiling water, did they ever wonder why everyone who underwent the ordeal was guilty? I mean, because everyone who plunges their hands into boiling water is going to burn. I can't imagine there was even one instance where someone was not burned by the boiling water. Well, it's okay. So we have to back up a step. So the first step is to think about what the incentives actually are, right? So if you're innocent, if Trevor didn't do it, he expects that God will perform a miracle that will prevent him from getting burned. And that's better than if he does the alternative, which would be to say confess to decline the ordeal. So if he's innocent, he'll undergo the ordeal. We'll come back to that in a moment. If he's guilty on the other hand, right, he would rather confess than undergo the ordeal because if he undergoes, he thinks that God's going to out him. So he has his arm boiled to rags. Plus he has to face whatever the state stipulated punishment is for having committed this crime. Whereas if he confesses at a minimum, he saves his arm from being boiled, plus he probably gets a slightly reduced state fine. So if he's guilty, he's going to decline the ordeal. So as you suggest, this implies that only the innocent guys will undergo it, which means Trevor only undergoes it if in fact he didn't commit the crime. But then we have the little problem of the fact that boiling water in fact burns people's arms even if they're innocent, which requires therefore that the person who was conducting the ordeal, which were clerics, was priests, needs to somehow manipulate it in order that it doesn't burn Trevor's arm. And if you look to essentially ordeal instructions that medieval priests were to follow when administering these things, what you find is that they basically consist of instructions that more or less directed the priests to manipulate the water's temperature in this particular case, for instance, such that it wouldn't in fact burn Trevor's arm. So that's not, I mean, that they put fewer logs on the fire or could they also were the ones that expecting the arm too, right? So they could also manipulate the after putting your arm to the water test. Yeah. Yeah. The ultimate thing is that exactly whether the let's say that they fail to lower the temperature of the fire in the end, you're exactly right. They can declare your arm having been unburned either way because they're the ones who have ultimate decision. But that would be pretty fishy to people. If your arm comes out of the water and it's clearly all burned up, people are going to probably think that you're just saying that his arm didn't burn. So it was kind of important for them to make sure that the water didn't burn Trevor's arm. And in that case, what they did was things like allowing the water to cool. So there's a whole bunch of different tricks that they had, but one important piece of this is that you can make fires to be different temperatures. Anybody who's made a fire knows that or who's in like Boy Scouts remembers that. Priest prepared the ordeal fire that would either heat the water in this case or sometimes they used a piece of iron that they were heating. They made it in private and that allowed them to engage in a lot of tampering and fire cooling. The ordeal instructions, for example, directed priests to pour holy water into the cauldron. These were part of elaborate masses. So these were all sort of religious rituals. That would of course cool the temperature of the water. The defendant didn't actually plunge his hand into the water until the mass was over. And the mass was like, could be as long as the priest wanted. Often appears to have been many hours long. So by drawing out his prayers, essentially, because what the instructions directed was that the defendant doesn't stick his arm in the water until the priest says, that's my last prayer. The priest could draw the prayers out for as long as he wanted, allowing the water to cool more and more. So by the time that the defendant actually sticks his arm in there, it's you know, probably like lukewarm. So if he fails in those things, the priest that is, then he can sort of resort to this ultimate thing of declaring it unburned anyway. But probably most of the time he didn't need to do that. So mostly out of just a sense of morbid curiosity, what are some of the other kinds of ordeals that were common besides just plunging your hand into boiling water? So the chief other hot ordeal is the one that I alluded to a minute ago, which was the hot iron ordeals. The logic was the same, burn equal you were guilty, not burns equal is equal to your innocent. But instead of putting your arm in boiling water, you carried a piece of burning iron a certain number of paces. And then the sort of primary cold ordeal was the ordeal of cold water. And in that one, a priest plunked you into a pool of holy water. And the idea was that if you sank, God was allowing your guiltless body into his blessed pool, evidencing your innocence. And if you were guilty, God would make you float. He would, the holy water would reject your guilty soul and your floating would evidence you are guilt to the court. Now that one seems hard to manipulate. It is because you know, essentially you have to alter water specific gravity in order to make it in order to in order to ensure that people will sink through manipulation. But it turns out that unlike in the hot ordeals, in the cold ordeal, the cold water ordeal, you could essentially ensure that you got the outcome that you wanted to exonerate the defendant. As long as you sent the right kinds of defendants to them because certain type of people reliably sink in water without any trickery at all. And those people are lean males. So lean males have an 80% chance of sinking in water. Aaron's dad, that's good, okay. That's the one I'd pick. I mean, were all of them, I guess, guilt biased? Like so, so the... The priest, you mean? No, no, the ordeals. So that the thing that we would expect to happen in the circumstance, like you're getting burned by holding the thing or you're likely to float... Or sink, you mean. I mean, the guilty have the worst outcome, right? Right, right. No, but the most common outcome which would be being burned or floating when set in the water is the thing that correlates with guilt as opposed to the thing that correlates with innocence. Well, no, not necessarily because in the cold ordeal, whether or not you sink depends upon whether or not you're male or female. So the average lean male, as I was saying, has an 80% chance of sinking. In contrast, the average lean female has a... Only a 40% chance of sinking. So she's... Because of women have a higher percentage of body fat than men, they are much more likely to float. So if you send women to the cold ordeal under the same rule, they would tend to be found guilty rather than innocent, which is the opposite of what you were describing, I think. So this is fascinating, but it also seems that you're an economist and you'd like to... The evidence, you like to run different trials and studies and have a control and stuff and get some good statistics about this. What do we have? What evidence do we have other than the descriptions you've read that there was something weird going on here? Well, the strongest evidence that's predicted by this kind of logic is that most people who plunged their hands into boiling water or carried red hot burning iron would in fact miraculously be unscathed and thus exonerated by the ordeal. And that's fortunately the primary sort of evidence that's available. Having said that, the number of observations here is very small because we're dealing with 9th through 13th century effectively judicial records, which are more or less clerical records at the period. But there's this one pretty cool case that we have of this basilica in Hungary in the very early part of the 13th century, which is the end of the period in which our deals are being used, where we have recorded cases of people who underwent the ordeal of hot iron. And we know the outcomes for them, for a couple hundred of these guys or gals. And two-thirds of them show that the red hot iron did not miraculously did not burn the defendant who was therefore exonerated. So there's only a couple of possibilities here as I see it. The first is that consistent with the logic that I've described, priests were deliberately manipulating the ordeal to exonerate the defendants precisely because they knew that only innocent defendants would be willing to take the chance of carrying the hot iron in the first place. Or priests don't understand how to heat iron, which seems far less likely to me. Or that everyone in that town was a medieval David Blaine. There's a third. But you can't discount that weird black swan event. So why don't we do this? I mean, aside from the superstition element, which is a theme of the book, how much your personal belief matters to this, but what cause or deals to go away? And then I guess the second question is you point out, is there anything like this today? With respect to the first question, what caused them to go away? We can get what this is, again, a kind of prediction of the logic. So the logic says people's belief in this thing actually being divine, that God is conducting the ordeal effectively rather than the priests manipulating them, is required in order for this system to function. If people don't believe that, if the belief goes away, then the different incentives that that Trevor would face, depending upon whether he's guilty or innocent, to undergo or to decline the ordeal would go away. And so the whole thing would fall apart. So the logic says that when that belief is removed or erodes, that the ordeal will cease to be effective, so we should expect it to basically disappear. And that's exactly what we find. So at the fourth ladder in council in the early, in the early 13th century, 1215. I was like, 1215, I remember that one from trivia question. Can you do 1215, yes. Nailed it, exactly. And the Pope innocent the third, did you remember that one? Yeah, huh, yep. So he basically declared, up until this period, the church's position was, yes, ordeals, of course, are divine. And there was some internal debate, however, among ecclesiastics about whether or not they were canonical. Some ecclesiastics basically said, yep, we've got strong biblical support for these. Let's keep on trucking. And some others said, you know what, I think there's not really any biblical support for this. In fact, if anything, I think it might contradict what the Bible says. And so there's this sort of internal debate that's raging among the ecclesiastics over this issue. And the latter camp won out. And so in the 100 years proceeding, leading up to 1215, their basic argument had been gaining steam within the church. And that's what led to the fourth ladder in council, where the Pope says, okay, ordeals, you know how we've been saying that, you know, those are legit. Actually, we were wrong about that. They're not scriptural. God isn't part of them. He doesn't want us to be engaged in these things. And all priests are now barred from administering or participating in ordeals. So when the church does that, it basically pulls the rug out from underneath the belief, the remaining belief at least, throughout medieval Europe, that supporting the effect of use of ordeals and in consequence, ordeals quickly vanish. Incidentally, it's the disappearance of ordeals in the early 13th century directly that gives rise to shortly thereafter, trial by jury in England and the inquisitorial procedure on the continent. It was, everybody was using trial by ordeal up until that point. And when they went away, people were sort of, you know, looking around and saying, well, how the hell are we going to adjudicate criminal cases now? And those were essentially the two forms that emerged to fill that void. And now today we have something else you point out really interestingly, the polygraph. Yeah, there's a bunch of different examples of it. But I think the polygraph is like, you know, the most telling case. So a lot of Americans, like smart, well-educated, you know, Americans and people outside of the United States, believe that poly, you know, so-called lie detector tests, believe that they're real, that they actually, that it's possible to physiologically, you know, measure or determine whether or not someone is lying or telling the truth. Of course, the scientific consensus is that, that's horseshit. You know, there's about as much validity to that idea as there is in the idea that God is intervening in our judicial affairs to determine the outcomes. You know, it's a pseudoscience. But it doesn't matter that it's a pseudoscience because conditional on people believing it as many, as I said, do, that it's true, administering polygraphs or lie detectors has the same incentive properties that administering medieval judicial or deals did. They leverage the exact same logic. It's just that they use a different superstition in order to make them effective. Well, let's, let's move on to the thing that I'm sure a lot of us married men have thought about. I was going to say the same thing. Aaron's favorite topic, wife-selling. It is wife-selling. So when there was a heyday of wife-selling, it wasn't that long ago. No, it was industrial revolution era. So you find some before and after this, but you can think of it as, think of it as, you know, the period between like 1750 and 1880 or so. And why, why was that particularly robust time for wife-selling? Well, you have to, you got to read the book to find out, to find out all the details. It's a, a lot of these, I should say are sort of like, we're giving it, which is natural in this context, it's sort of a superficial gloss, but there's a lot of, the stories are much more complex, right? And this one, I think is, is kind of especially so. And, but anyway, the basic idea here is that during this period, men from lower classes, so it was typically impoverished people, relatively couples who were engaging in this thing, would sell their wives at public auctions, the same public auctions at which, you know, livestock were sold, it was at the town market, effectively. They would trot them out there, just like livestock, the potential bidders would, you know, basically get a look at her. They'd put her on the block and an auctioneer would, you know, extoll her, her virtues and vices, and then there, the bidding would commence. And, and this is a crucial part, conditional on the wife agreeing to be sold to a new husband, to a new male, who would become her new husband. The sale was transacted and an existing marriage was essentially dissolved and a new one was formed. That's the gist of the practice, which on the surface, you know, I think, patriarchal capitalism. Yeah, that sounds like horror, the horrors of patriarchal capitalism. Exactly. It sounds like pretty much, you know, the worst thing you can imagine. And I don't mean to say that it was a glorious thing, right? So my claim is not, same thing with medieval judicial ordeals, my claim is, my claim is not that, you know, look how wonderful it is to have a system where you plunge your arm and boil in water or where, you know, people are selling off spouses, that that's not the claim. The claim throughout the book is that in order to understand these things as, as, and to give them, to give them their due, I think, in a sense, rather than writing them off as barbaric, you have to understand the constraints that, and the incentives that they involved and that they reflected. And in the context of industrial revolution era, wife selling, the important constraints were effectively that it was really, really hard, there's a couple of them, but it was really, really hard to get a legal divorce. Technically, legal divorces didn't exist, essentially. But there were various forms of de facto marital dissolution. And under the law, that the, those de facto means of marital dissolution were very easy for unhappy men who wanted to exit their marriages to appeal to, but they were very difficult for women to appeal to. Now, there's this thing, right, called the coast theorem, which says, well, it doesn't really matter because if, in fact, it's efficient for a marriage to dissolve, then, regardless of whether or not the law says that one party has the right to exit and the other doesn't, or not, there will be an exchange, in this case, the wife could just pay the husband to basically buy the property right to let her out of the marriage, even though the law doesn't allow it. So it's a sort of trade as a workaround to the law. The difficulty, and this comes to the second piece of the law that's critical in the case of wife sales, here is that the law marriage, marital property law during this period deprived wives of property rights. Upon getting married, so a single woman in industrial revolution era England enjoyed property rights just like Amanda. But upon getting married, her legal status converted such that all of the property that she had when she entered the marriage, and all that would come into her possession throughout the marriage was no longer hers, instead it devolved exclusively to her husband. So she had no bargaining position. Exactly. How could you buy the right to exit marriage from your husband if all the things you would use to buy from him, all the money, the land, whatever you might have is already his. But you could get someone else to buy your position. Now I'm seeing it. Exactly. And that's why this auctioning procedure with wife sales happened. So if the couple, if the husband and the wife could identify a third party who was male, who valued the wife more than her current husband did and who she valued as a husband more than she valued her current husband as a husband, then that man could essentially allow for an indirect cozy in trade. He could pay the husband for the right to have her, making all three of them better off because he has property that the husband doesn't have unlike the wife. Then were most of these were most of these transactions the result of unhappy marriages of the kinds that we're describing where the partners that wife wanted out and the husband agreed in exchange for someone else's money because I can, I imagine that there might also have been cases where this was just due to financial hardship. Like maybe neither the husband nor wife wanted this but they were poor, they had mouths to feed and this was just a way to make money. Well, even if it were the latter case, note that that would still be actually a subset of the former case that you described. It would be a means, it would be a workaround as a way for them to basically all be made better off as a result of the trade. It's just that the reason that it would be making them better off would be as you described it, financial hardship as opposed to say the husband and wife just not getting along or one of them cheating on the other or something like that. The evidence suggests that it's that we have anyway suggested it was the first type of case that you described which is the couples were unhappy in their marital situation not because of economic hardship but rather because one of them was cheating on the other. And so typically actually the wife having an affair which suggests a couple of things, right? One, she values not being in the marriage very highly and two, now her husband probably doesn't value being married to her very much either or at least his valuation of that is lowered. And they probably now they have a willing buyer possibly if she had an affair. Exactly. And he would often be the guy at the wife's sale who would make the highest bid and so she would go to him. But regardless of the precise reason so in that typical case it seems or even if it were as you put it a money making scheme which again it is in a sense no matter how you think about it somebody needs a financial incentive basically to to do the thing that's happening here. But in either case the critical part back to the capitalist patriarchy here is that all of the parties are made better off. Most importantly at least from my perspective in this context the wives without these sales these unhappy wives have no other way of getting out of their unhappy marriages since they have to consent to be sold and since we just discussed typically they were being sold to their lovers they were made better off as a consequence of the trade rather than worse off. So this this practice that looks like you know slavery or something like it at the outset in fact I think was a welfare improvement for women a significant one at the time given the constraints going back to that of industrial revolution property and marital law. And as soon as those change that would probably say that the practice would change itself if women are no longer property. Precisely and that's again exactly what we find. So towards the latter part of the 19th century from about 1840 from the 1840s to like the 1880s maybe even up to 1890 you have a series in England of new legislation that parliament passes that basically step by step give women married women more and more property rights making them consonant to the property rights that they basically had a single woman. And once that happens you don't need to resort to wife sales if you're an unhappy wife to get out of your marriage because even if it's if it's really difficult for you to get out of the marriage under the law without your husband's permission now you actually have property that's yours that isn't his that you can use as a bargaining chip that you can use to pay him to bribe your way out of the bad marriage and that's what we see happens. Now there's a your book has many interesting chapters we don't have time to get to all of them of course I definitely suggest listeners to read it my favorite ones I'm going to go to my personal favorite one so just to give some more ideas of what you're what the WTF is maledictions in a chapter called goddamn that the the presence and use of maledictions what is a malediction? A malediction is the opposite of a benediction so for your Catholic audience I grew up in the in the Catholic Church I still consider myself Catholic in some ways I guess but in any event so a benediction right you know at mass that the priest will will basically offer blessings and they'll sometimes they'll point to specific people not necessarily in the parish although sometimes but they have special blessings to thank people or to ask God to do special things and you know brotherly love and all of that stuff a malediction they're not around anymore but church would be far more entertaining if they were I think the priest of the exact opposite he would call out specific people and basically ask God to damn them in a variety of like really just you know disturbing ways yeah graphic ways so this is basically a faculty staff meeting and it was it was ornate too because they they went through different physical procedures not just saying may your wife in your fields and your days and your nights be cursed they also did did a bunch of weird things I'm just keep pictures of my mind I'm like wow this is bizarre oh yeah yeah I mean it was you know they would specifically say you know may you know basically may like may your eyes you know rot in your skull may your intestines be torn out and eaten by ravenous wolves may or I mean some of the stuff when you imagine that it's priests that are saying this at mass is pretty crazy you know may your your wife or your daughter be raped I mean just like over the top and they'd lie down on the ground and do other weird things yeah yeah so that was a that was a called a clamor you know one of the things that they could do was would be to take you know holy relics in particular and put them on the floor and then lay themselves prostrate on the floor and the idea was that they would basically be humiliating the saints that these relics reflected and so the thought was you know if you if you piss off the saints basically you're working them up and getting them really angry so that the curses will be especially you know bad when they're when they're launched at whoever the target is how does one end up on this list of people to be cursed by the local priest well so the the maledictions that I study are in ninth and tenth century frankia which is you know isn't really equivalent to modern france but we can sort of think about it it's in that area and what you did in that period to to basically to get on the to get on the shit list was to steal from the church to steal from the the priests or the monks it was a lot of times it was these were monastic curses so it was the it was the monks property and that seems kind of weird maybe from a contemporary perspective but well maybe not so weird especially during this period the church has tremendous wealth you know they have tons of land they've got lots of physical goods that are valuable and what they don't have is the physical means of self-protection however when you took up the cloth you basically laid down your arms and made a vow to live you know the the monastic slash priestly life and so that meant you didn't have you know weapons and so they kind of resorted to these spiritual weapons to basically cope with their property depredators instead so just like the ordeal this would require the the cursed to believe that there was some power to what the monks were doing so maybe that's one reason for the ceremony and other than just saying it laying down on the ground and putting the relics on the ground and stuff so it depends on their belief yeah it's again yep you're absolutely right it's critical you know it only it only works if you are threatening to take something from me and I say you know God's going to smite you now and in the afterlife that only might stop you from stealing from me if you actually believe in God for instance and in particular if not only do you have to believe in God but you have to believe that God will in fact curse people who do things who do things like stealing from somebody and and that priests in particular have the power to call on God to ask them to ask him to do that favor in that case and the medieval priests were really lucky in this regard because you know if you if you take a read of the Bible it's basically littered with these divine curses and you pretty much all of the exact graphic nasty curses met these maledictions that clerics in this period were launching at people who were who were plundering them were the same curses that you find in the Bible so and the Bible was something in which in Christendom and this in this place in Christendom many people believed which is precisely what gave them their power to be effective that then seems to play at odds with I guess the specific nature of these curses because it's one thing if the priest says you know God is going to make something bad happen to you because this was you know this was a time when bad things happens to people all the time but but the really specific nature like your eyes are going to rot out or you know some other thing that the likelihood of that actually happening seems rather low it does which is why if you used a very specific one a lot of them sound really specific but if you look close they're not so if here's an example if you if you're going to use something like your eyes rotting out of your head you want to actually couple it with a whole bunch of other things that are some of which might be specific and some of which might be extremely vague all using sort of and or clauses so may your eyes rot out of your head or you be miserable for the rest of your life or you lose your property to you know a fire and or or you suffer illnesses when you are in the north they would use directions or in the south or in the west if you look at these things one of the patterns that shows up is that just again having this veneer of specificity in fact they're extremely genital and broad sort of catch all curses so they kind of ultimately account for all possible states of affairs in which you might be and in the end say that something bad will happen to you in fact they often what won't maybe not just happen to you now but alternatively they might happen to you in the afterlife so un-falsifiable what's that that's non-falsifiable then exactly yeah precisely that there's no way to falsify the thing because one you can never observe what happens to a person in the afterlife and maybe so if nothing comes true in their life there's always that possibility but moreover the stuff that's in your life is all encompassing it's almost certain that at some point something bad is going to happen to you and if you make the malediction broad enough it's going to encompass that thing so there's no way to know when it happens if it happened because of the curse or it was found to happen anyway so the constraints here were were the relative predation on property of the church during this one right 9th and 10th century Frankia Carolingian period and so kind of like the other situations presumably when that changed and some of that is for better state power than the curses didn't were sort of went away the maledictions yeah exactly I mean this period's interesting because basically leading up to the to the period that in which curses were used the state existed and it was the it was the the force that was protecting the monks and priests property rights so it wasn't a big deal that the monks and priests didn't have their own weapons effectively then this this period of state basically erosion occurs for a century or two the priests now don't have that external enforcement of their property rights so they resort to maledictions but what's neat that happens is that at the end of this period the state actually reemerges and its power to protect the monks and priests property rights consequently reemerges and that's exactly what they do and right when that happens lo and behold the priests and monks put their malediction formulas away and we don't ever hear about them again so it seems pretty clear to me that it was that this was a means of private property enforcement that was a second best solution you know it wasn't the monks or priests preferred way of doing things otherwise they would have done it even when the state was there they only use it in that intermediary period where basically they don't enjoy that protection So does that I mean as a libertarian podcast does that and I know we're not we're looking at this economically in states and other institutions do different things to protect property rights but that seems like an endorsement of the state to come in and change at least this sort of bizarre way of cursing people to protect property rights it's probably better to rely on maybe that's the thing the state relies on force not belief that you don't need people to believe in the superstition or something you just need the people to believe in the force of the state and so it's a little bit more scalable and it's a little bit more manageable Yeah, yeah, exactly I mean to me there's no it doesn't have an implication for libertarianism one way or the other look I think it's my perspective as a libertarian is not does not take the following position that government can never do anything that private actors can't do it can right that's the whole it certainly can do those things to me the libertarian point is that in general on net the costs that come with that exceed the benefits but not that in any particular case there isn't something that it couldn't do that would provide a benefit that private actors couldn't do and I think this is an example of that so you know the state may it presumably did have a strong interest in protecting the monks property rights and that's why it was more effective than these curses which as you say required belief and therefore in a sense are more fragile but that doesn't mean that in general state enforcement of property rights even is superior because we're focusing just on its implications for monastic communities what was its implications for broader society just because the state was willing to do better on protecting monks property rights doesn't mean that it was protecting other people's property rights better or doesn't mean that it was engaging in activities more generally that promoted economic progress I'm not saying that it didn't either but simply we can't infer from I feel like sometimes libertarians have this tendency to be unwilling to acknowledge that government could do something that might have some isolated effect that they would consider positive and I think that that's a wrong attitude to have because it's clearly wrong I agree now for the last one I'd like you to talk about but I'd like you to not tell the answer to our listeners so they can read your book because about I think it's the weirdest thing in the book which is trials of animals so what was the situation for trials of animals during the Renaissance in France Italy and Switzerland ecclesiastic courts which were the primary courts of the period ecclesiastic courts criminally prosecuted insects and rodents for property crimes and trespass so you know if if we're dealing with primarily farmers here so if you have you know say an infestation of locusts or some rats eat your you know barley crop or something what you could and citizens often did would be to bring a formal complaint to the equivalent of what we would call a district attorney a modern day district attorney in their community who would then formally lodge the complaint with the court and the court would consider whether or not to hear the case which would involve prosecuting the critters and the court cases the trials of these animals and insects proceeded and had the exact form as they do for people they treated them just like they were people so the the crickets or the locusts or the rats or whatever would be defense would be given a court appointed defense attorney and the the trials could and often did drag on for months with legal wrangling on both sides and then the court would in the end issue issue its verdict and if the if the insects or rodents were convicted the punishment is just as weird as the fact that they were doing this in the first place I don't know what the weirdest part is was malediction and anathema banish the locusts I'm sorry excommunication in an anthem okay okay so and then isn't that different but I mean it's a it's a weird thing to do to not only insects and vermin but you know presumably they were never communicated in the first place they weren't part of the church and they don't have souls to be able to be damned to hell nevertheless that was the punishment and they had summonses and they you have you mentioned that there is one eight-month trial like for weevils with very serious defenses mounted against the weevils including one of them being they're not people yes yes it's it's insane it's it seems insane and the I mean there were as you mentioned there were summons they would be granted the defendants would be granted continuances on the on the grounds that you know the some rats for example were granted repeated continuances on the grounds that some cats had prevented them from making it to to trial because they were supposed to actually appear with their counselor in front of the court and so that was one of the way one of the ways to convict them was basically if they didn't show up enough times then the prosecuting attorney would say look you know we got to find them in default they're not even showing up so the defense attorneys would have to basically you know make up all of these all these things about why they weren't were ultimately plead you know look they're they're cricket so they're not that bright it's hard to get them to come along so why don't you just let us defend them in their absence that was the sort of thing so as intriguing as all this is as I think about my wife's cat I do you think that the people involved in this were like in on the joke did they really take this seriously in general with all of these things I think that the the relevant populations so the defendants say in trial by ordeal and the farmers who were asking who were initiating these legal cases against the vermin I believe that they reposed some positive level of belief in the thing yes that is not equivalent to saying that they were not skeptical so you can believe so you can assign a positive probability to something being true but it'd be a very low probability right and thus be predominantly skeptical as long as in in the case of ordeals this and this example and others throughout the book the arguments as long as people have some greater than zero belief the logic goes through there are different implications depending upon their level of belief which I talk about in the book but the key thing is that you can be super skeptical you just can't be so skeptical that you that you immediately ruled out of hand and in the case of vermin trials for instance it's important to note that it might seem crazy to think that farmers would do something like this but you have to remember that if you look at like basically the equivalent of sort of farmers manuals pesticide manuals of the period the non ecclesiastic remedies for these the non legal remedies for dealing with them consist of like things that we would consider absurd more generally and so you know during the period of vermin trials you got to remember that that's you know this was the period during which elites now we're in the witch trial era by the way and this is a period in which elites thought that witches were real and that they stole men's genitals in their sleep and all kinds of crazy stuff so when you once you recognize that that people believe things like that the idea that you know a simple farmer might think that he could get a court to basically deal with his infestation problem doesn't seem that outrageous then say there's an addition a new addition of your book that comes out 500 years from now it what I mean you mentioned polygraph but what besides polygraph do you think we do now and do very earnestly that would make a chapter in the book oh wow that's a great question you know it's something that I think about a lot and I don't know that I don't know that I have a specific answer I have maybe a couple of suggestions in a second but the general point I think or what your question gets at to me is a critical thing it's a point that I'm constantly making when I talk about this and is a message that I'm trying to get through also with the book which is that people basically a shouldn't take themselves so seriously and b think that they meaning their societies whether you know their culture is so you know sophisticated and clever because both what you find is this incredible degree of cleverness in things that seem preposterous and absurd in the past and furthermore you also see these beliefs that we regard today as absurd that have existed throughout the ages which should give any critical critical thinking person pause to raise exactly the question that you raise which is even if we don't know even if we can't put our finger on which specific things will be tomorrow's absurdities precisely because we're steeped in it just like the farmers in the vermin trials were steeped in that belief to them it wasn't absurd when you don't when you are thinking in those terms you can't tell what's absurd right but what you do know is that it is certain that much of what we do now will be regarded as absurdity you